All posts tagged ‘Unground’

Images from the Ungrounded Kickstarter Comic Project, story by Patrick Gerard, art by Eryck Webb

This week’s journey up the cliffs of insanity features some great comics (see above image), a trip into New York City, and a sexy naked torso that caused a gaming firestorm. But first up, I wanted to look back at DC New 52 reboot and crunch the numbers on whether its a business success or not.

It’s been sixteen months since DC rebooted all its monthly comic titles and started over with first issues for everyone, streamlining their characters convoluted history to make them more accessible for new readers. Why do we care if it’s a business success? Because DC is one of the big two comic companies and how DC goes affects the entire industry. Which affects what may potentially be available for me and you to read on any given Wednesday.

There are two ways to measure success. One is sales figures, the second is reading enjoyment.

The first seems black and white but isn’t. We have numbers to crunch but we don’t have the full context for those numbers, making the black and white a little bit gray.

First, what really matters is not how you or I look at the sales numbers but how DC and Warner Brothers look at them. If the sales meet or exceed whatever bar was set internally, the reboot is a success, even if the approimately three to three and a half percent increase in the direct sales market seems a little, well, small.

Before the new 52, two years ago in January 2011, DC had a 26.38 percent retail dollar market share and and 31.8 percent of overall unit sales of the direct market. Marvel had 39.06 percent of the dollar share and 42.37 percent of the product market share, according to numbers provided by Diamond Comic Distributors, the company that supplies nearly all comic shops that receives weekly shipment.In December 2012, (last month), the retail dollar market share for Marvel was 33.40 percent and 29.69 percent for DC. Unit market share was 36.1 percent for Marvel and 34.84 percent for DC.

That’s about a three and a half percent increase for dollar market share and about a three percent increase in dollar share if you if you compare January 2011 to December 2012.

To me, that’s a huge amount of publicity, marketing and reworking of their characters for a small increase. Rich Johnson over at Bleeding Cool calls this very successful overall for DC because their numbers were trending downward after January 2011 before the reboot was announced. His point is that this shouldn’t be looked at as a three percent increase but an increase that prevented DC from losing even more dollars and market share.

It’s one way to look at it, perhaps an accurate one. DC definitely pulled over some readers from Marvel in the direct market. But the most lasting impact on the reboot might have been their decision to go same day digital with all their comics. And we are missing those sales figures.

DC’s decision to make all their comics available digitally the same day as they arrived at comic retailers changed the industry. At first, it was just them. Now, it’s standard in the industry, as Marvel and the other major independent companies followed DC’s example.

Meaning the key to the success or failure of the DC reboot might be how much more money is DC bringing in digitally. And the answer is…nobody knows because Comixology.com, their digital vendor, isn’t providing any specific sales figures.